I' mi volsi a man destra, e puosi mente
a l'altro polo, e vidi quattro stelle
non viste mai fuor ch'a la prima gente.

Goder pareva 'l ciel di lor fiammelle:
oh settentrïonal vedovo sito,
poi che privato se' di mirar quelle!

(Purg. I, 22-27)

Foreword

This chapter offers an overview of Dante studies in Australia, with particular attention to two complementary aspects: the bond between the Supreme Poet and the Italian migrant community, on the one hand, and the contribution of the many English-speaking intellectuals who for decades have engaged in the exegesis, as well as the translation and popularisation, of Dante's work, on the other. On one of Melbourne's university campuses a tangible example of this twofold presence can be seen: in front of the Thomas Cherry Building, at La Trobe University in Melbourne, there rises a sculpture that today goes almost unnoticed by the throngs of students who converge every day, or used to converge, before the grim months of COVID-19, on the nearby bus station. It is a striking bronze pyramid ten metres high, with a triangular base, made between 1980 and 1983 by Bart Sanciolo, an Italian-Australian sculptor, and donated to Australia by the Italian community in 1987. On each of its sides the sculpture depicts one of Dante's canticles, with figures emerging from the flat geometry of the surface to express, in harsh realism, a multitude of states of mind, following a narrative that unfolds in an upward movement. Sanciolo, born in Italy in 1955, arrived in Australia in 1968, a few years after the migratory boom which, from 1941 to 1961, saw the arrival of 330,000 fellow Italians, roughly 50% of the total of Italian migrants to Australia between 1876 and 1976.[1]

Bart Sanciolo's Dante sculpture[2]

The highly symbolic value attached to the union between Dante and the Italian community stems from the perception of the Supreme Poet as the migrant par excellence, as well as an ambassador of the Italian language, for which Australians still nurture a keen educational interest, whether at school, at university, or purely as amateurs. Thus the exhortation of Dante's Ulysses, "Fatti non foste a viver come bruti", set on the monument's commemorative plaque, becomes an appeal to the new Australian generations to take its teaching to heart.

The dialogue between Dante and the figurative arts in Australia has continued in recent decades with an exhibition of thirty contemporary Australian artists, entitled "Dante e l'Australia", held in the Franciscan Cloisters of Ravenna between 1 April and 30 September 1993.[3]These works have a particular significance because they show how the Dantean imaginary, promoted by so much popular culture, influenced the inspiration of Australian artists and writers, even more than the written text did, thanks, among other things, to the figurative reworking, charged with physicality and dreamlike invention, of William Blake's magnificent illustrations, of which the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne holds thirty-six of the 102 watercolours (1824-1827) devoted to the poem, acquired in 1920, along with 14 prints donated between 1960 and 1968.[4]Michael Curtotti points out that Dante's influence is still present in more recent Australian figurative art: for example, in 2014 one of the most admired Australian painters, Garry Shead, exhibited 21 paintings drawn from the Divine Comedy, the result of an artistic, spiritual, indeed "mediumistic" journey with Dante and his world, in which the afterlife is portrayed by juxtaposition with emblematic Australian places. The same complementarity between the transcendental poetic universe and Australian historical reality finds expression in another well-known Australian artist, Sidney Nolan, of whom 60 illustrations survive (1967-68), unsettling reworkings of Sandro Botticelli's unfinished illustrations.[5]

Beyond the iconographic aspect, the encounter with Dante's work in the original language in Australia has followed the changing fortunes of Italian as a language of study. Whereas from the early twentieth century the learning of Italian was largely motivated by the learners' Italian-speaking family background, in recent decades the marked increase in the non-Italian component, with very different skills and motivations, has called the usual teaching methods into question and prompted a search for new strategies. While it is true that the descendants of Italians who emigrated to Australia after the Second World War number roughly 916,000 according to the 2016 census, only 271,597 (1.2% of the total population) still speak Italian at home,[6] whereas the overall number of students of Italian in compulsory or university education in 2019 amounted to almost 340,000, out of a total population of around 25 million (up 8% on 2017/18), Italian being more popular than in countries such as France, Germany, the United States or Argentina.[7]The number of university students is nonetheless rather low, standing at around 2,513. In this gap of motivation on the part of learners, no longer identifiable with the descendants of Italian emigrants alone, the cultural aspect, literary, artistic, sociological, comes to the fore over the purely 'affective' or 'belonging' one, allowing a discourse on Dante studies to graft itself on successfully, as the fair number of Australian Dante scholars of English-speaking background demonstrates.

The beginnings of Dante studies

By its geographical location, Australia occupies a position markedly removed from the major cultural axes and, despite the pull exerted by the nearer South-East Asia, it still retains a close affinity with Anglo-Saxon society, on which it has modelled important matters such as laws, customs, education and so forth. The globalised world has certainly shortened distances, and yet there seems to persist a psychological detachment, at times proudly separatist, of Australia from the rest of the 'Western' world. This situation invites reflection on the scope, quantitative but, above all, qualitative, of Italian studies and, in particular, of Dante studies in Australia. The Newest World too was able to enjoy, at least by reflection, the wave of reappraisal of Dante's work and of the Italian classics that came about through the mediation of the English Romantic poets in the first half, and of the Pre-Raphaelites in the second half, of the nineteenth century, so much so that in 1870, Pesman Cooper reports, the Melbourne public library boasted a catalogue of more than 500 texts in Italian, which then doubled over the following ten years.[8] Undeniably, however, the spread of Italian language and culture in late nineteenth-century Australia, outstripped by that of French, was confined to a few intellectual circles. Anglo-Australian popular culture, by contrast, had appropriated the Italian imaginary as a theatrical setting, scenic par excellence, drawn from Shakespeare and handed down by the first playwrights and novelists of the Australian colonies.[9]It cannot be ruled out, on the other hand, that the second 'Dantean' wave, promoted by writers of the stature of T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and William Butler Yeats, left a deeper mark on the reception of the Supreme Poet at the antipodes. Indeed, in a 2001 article, Diana Modesto tells us how Italian as a university discipline was born in Sydney at the very height of modernism, in 1923, at the encouragement of a bohemian Australian academic and poet of Symbolist inspiration, Christopher Brennan, three decades after the inauguration of the two branches of the Dante Alighieri Society in Melbourne and Sydney, both in 1896. The former, founded by the Italian consul in Melbourne, Pasquale Corte, had as its president an Australian 'features page' journalist with the unremarkable name of James Smith[10]; the Sydney branch, by contrast, arose on the initiative of a surgeon of Florentine origin, Thomas Henry Fiaschi.
Interest in Dante can nonetheless be traced back to the previous decade: on 27 November and 9 December 1882 the daily Sydney Morning Herald published two reports of Dante lectures by Professor Badham,[11]a classicist, translator of Dantean fragments, and at the time rector of the University of Sydney, welcomed by a large audience of 250 "refined and appreciative" spectators.[12] The lectures dwelt on questions that have always, in one way or another, fascinated the English-speaking reader of Dante: the affinities with the poetry of John Milton; the strength of character of the figure of Dante in the face of the political adversities of his time; the theological reasons behind the choice to treat in verse a subject as "revolting" as the torments of Hell; the emphasis on the universality of human compassion and solidarity, a theme dear to the Victorians; the opposition between Italian terza rima and English blank verse. Inevitably, the discussion ended with the figure of Beatrice. In 1892, in another lectura Dantis in a Catholic setting (the notorious Y.M.C.A.), the Reverend O'Brien warns against understanding Beatrice as a historical figure, inviting us instead to contemplate her as pure allegory, such as to justify lines of the Comedy that would otherwise appear blasphemous if attributed to a 'real' Beatrice.[13]With the exception of some interpretative licence, more than a century later one can discern a continuity of themes in the scholarly approach to Dante among more recent Australian scholars.
With the introduction of courses in the main universities, starting with Sydney (1923) and Adelaide (1927), followed by the degree in Italian at Sydney in 1937 and at Melbourne in the 1960s, a place of primary importance was reserved for the teaching of Dante and the Comedy as the indispensable cultural baggage of the antipodean Italianist. In the years between 1960 and 2000 the humanities were able to count on a broad deployment of financial and human resources, thanks in part to the promotion, from 1989, of the so-called community languages, in a widespread attempt by state administration to break away from the pro-British attitude typical of the more conservative branch of Australian society, to promote bilingualism or multilingualism, in which English figures as mother tongue or second language, and to open up to the new migrant cultures. The introduction, from state primary schooling onwards, of the study of eighteen different languages,[14] both European and Asian, had repercussions on the need to train language teachers and to establish an appropriate course of university study, to the point of incorporating it into the recent Master of Teaching, lasting two years full time, divided by school level according to the teacher's subject specialisation. The increase in resources invested in academic training was reflected in a heightened interest in literary subjects over the last two decades of the twentieth century. To this period belong numerous studies of Dante from a variety of perspectives: thus, in 1999, Margaret Baker and Diana Glenn, two lecturers at the Flinders University of South Australia, edited a volume entitled Dante's Colloquia in Australia,[15]containing essays produced between 1982 and 1999, which sketch a fascinating picture of the progress of Australian Dante studies. What were the orientations of Australian research on Dante? Of the seventeen essays presented, three are purely philological; a limited section is devoted to literary and theological aspects, while essays of a socio-political and symbolic-metaphorical character predominate. The former revolve around the theme of moral and political factionalism in the Inferno, the predominance of the political order over the theological one, Dante's patriotism, or the theme of loss of identity and deprivation of political and existential rights, with references to the Dante recounted by Primo Levi. A considerable section is moreover given over to the allegorical symbolism of the Comedy: the river Lethe and the demystification of the symbolic link between smoke and sin, the non-Christological interpretation of the griffin, the theme of the mirror, to cite a few examples.
In later years, an initiative of particular philological significance was, from 1998 to 2010, the digitisation, by Australian Italianists under the direction of Professor Prue Shaw, of the manuscript basis of Federico Sanguineti's critical edition of the Comedìa, the so-called "Stemma Sanguineti" (2001). It is a collation, not free of reservations,[16]of seven manuscripts later than the Tuscan-derived Trivulziano, and drawn mainly from the Urbinate manuscript, of the northern tradition, held to be more conservative, but with the inclusion of further readings introduced without reference to known manuscripts, a criterion adopted by Petrocchi himself in the 1960s.[17] The project, born in collaboration with Sanguineti himself in order to prove the validity of the stemma, proved instead, over the years, an effective comparative phylogenetic tool that, in many respects, refutes the Sanguineti reading.[18] The text, in DVD and online versions,[19] presents the photographic reproduction of parts of the manuscripts compared (and the Trivulziano in full), except for the Urbinate, for copyright reasons. The text is given in its various versions and even in the successive rewritings on the manuscripts. Despite criticism of the limited selection of artefacts used, justified by the very limits of digitisation, the historical-literary and palaeographic scope of this project is of unquestionable value.
Modesto also cites significant scholarly contributions over the last thirty years, from the aforementioned Dante Colloquia to the Dante Conferences in 2002 and 2004 at Flinders University, and in 2003 at La Trobe University, three events which, unfortunately, had no further sequel.[20] Dante studies too absorbed the effects of a generalised crisis of the humanities and a series of cuts made to the budgets of universities, the great majority of them public, by governments over the last two decades,[21] which seem to pursue relentlessly the aim of privatising the sector, or of making it ever more dependent on the laws of the market and on the supposed professional marketability of a qualification, so as to overshadow the formative importance of the humanities. In spite of the circumstances, and taking advantage of the widening of the courses' catchment,[22] costly but not elitist, some tenacious Dante scholars have managed to reinvent their teaching offer in various directions; we shall see which.

Initiatives inside and outside the university

In very recent years, teaching paths linked to the Supreme Poet have shown that, despite the straitened circumstances of literary subjects within the general framework of the university system, it is still possible to attract students' interest to Dantean themes. The first initiative concerns the University of Western Australia in Perth, where for five years Professor John Kinder has run a course entitled Dante's Comedy: a Medieval Masterpiece for our Modern World. Although he is not a Dante scholar tout court, Kinder seeks to bring the poem's discourse up to date, focusing on Inferno and Purgatorio, in the original version but also with the aid of a translation, and we shall see the importance of the English version of the Comedy for the Australian reader. The course is taught in English to a varied group of students, some in the third year of Italian, others with prior schooling in it, others again absolute beginners: English is therefore necessary, for the sake of a thematic deepening of the text that would otherwise be reduced to a simplified paraphrase of the original. Such a device may make the philologist wrinkle their nose, but it is rather in keeping with the interactive Australian teaching system, in which students play an active part in determining the content and manner of the course. Although the structure of the lessons is not based on the philology of the text, Kinder aims to teach students to relate to the poem, encouraging them to translate and interpret passages of the Italian original themselves. The approach adopted thus seeks to shed light on the universal ethical questions raised by Dante's poem through critical tools suggested by contemporary existential concerns. On the one hand, Kinder explains, Dante upholds the medieval principle whereby all the facts and phenomena of the cosmos converge towards God, whose act of creation is the quintessence of the rationality of its Creator. On the other hand, our post-Enlightenment age rests on a rational use of doubt and scepticism, which tends to divide up the universe and to deny this unifying design of the Divine. Faced with these two opposing visions, Kinder, drawing on Il senso religioso (1957-97) by Luigi Giussani, manages to find a common denominator: desire, as the synthesis of the two essential components of human existence, love and freedom, through which one can graze the loftiest heights of knowledge, which must pass through the awareness of our dependence on the Other beyond ourselves. In the name of desire, but in the opposite direction, we are given the freedom to move away from the Other beyond ourselves and to let ourselves sink into the abysses of infernal solitude. Thus Dante, Kinder says, "No longer weighed down by the structural disproportion between his will and his capability, he is filled completely with the desire for complete satisfaction and so flies upwards of his own accord towards Paradise."[23]The Poet attains happiness only after a cyclical, non-linear journey, which must necessarily pass through hell as a discovery of the self, of one's human limits and of the need for the other. Only through knowledge of ourselves do we discover that we do not belong to ourselves, but exist for the Other. Such a non-confessional ethical approach to Dante's work, in the light of today's values and disvalues, appears as a stance quite distant from the supposed secular objectivity with which the teaching of the poem is often approached.
Kinder himself, in collaboration with Diana Glenn, has recently published a collection of essays entitled Legato per amore in un volume in recognition of John A. Scott's contribution to Dante studies, whose work Perché Dante?,[24]one of the most exhaustive and fascinating introductions to the poet's complete oeuvre, has seen its second edition published. Scott, an academic trained at Oxford and then moving on to Berkeley, Reading and, finally, the University of Western Australia, alternates an analytical investigation of aspects of Dante's work, including the "minor" texts, with themes of broader scope, such as the question of divine grace, the currents of Florentine political thought, avarice in Dante's day[25], or provocative subjects, as in the articles "Dante ha rivisto il testo dell'Inferno nel 1314?"[26] or "Una contraddizione scientifica nell'opera dantesca".[27]Unfortunately it must be noted that the new generations of Australian academics do not for now appear to have taken up his multidisciplinary legacy.
The second teaching offering on Dante, at the University of Melbourne, likewise focuses on the Inferno, running a course, taught by Dr Simon West and Professor Stephen Kolsky, entitled To Hell with Dante, a play on the curse "to hell with it". The course is aimed at a body of about 20-25 students with heterogeneous levels of knowledge of Italian. The structure of the lesson follows the profile of a lectura Dantis, with the aim of illustrating Dante's poetic world, albeit with a more scaled-down critical apparatus, since it is a complementary subject. The course makes use of several translations to combine the various versions for critical purposes; as mentioned earlier, this is one of the aspects that characterise the teaching of the Comedy in an English-speaking context.
A separate discussion, finally, is deserved by the Dante Alighieri Society. Born as a cultural association, in 1925 in Sydney it took on a clear political connotation, promoting the Fascist regime through its president, Antonio Baccarini, at the same time a lecturer in Italian at the University of Sydney. Leafing through the newspapers of the time,[28] one can bring out an elitist component among the participants in the activities, which ranged from military receptions to bridge tournaments, concerts and lectures on Carducci, Ariosto, Leopardi, and very few, in truth, on Dante Alighieri. For ten years Baccarini made himself a zealous promoter of Mussolini's foreign policy, although, as Cresciani maintains, his aim was not so much to indoctrinate the community of Italian migrants as to attract the sympathies of the Anglo-Australian intelligentsia, with a certain success, even if he did not manage to establish alliances with the local political right.[29]It is not surprising, therefore, that the presence of Italian associations in these years was an object of mistrust and apprehension (Baccarini himself would be interned as an enemy of the British Empire from 1940 to 1944). At the same time, 1925 was the year of the notorious report of the Queensland Ferry Royal Commission, which sanctioned the 'racial' inferiority and social dangerousness of Italians from the southern regions and, in general, of every southern European 'race'.[30]

Subsequently, thanks to the reform of the Dante's statute at international level in 1948, the Society was able to distinguish itself for a non-politicised imprint more open to the community, setting up Italian courses for high-school students or for adults, opening up to a more varied public, and thus reaching its peak attendance in the 1960s. In recent years, moreover, the new Dante Giovani group at the Dante Alighieri of Melbourne, for example, has been able to revive, after some years of stasis, a series of lessons on Dante's work for an assorted public. A promising academic of the University of Melbourne, Nicholas Sgro-Traikovski, has taught courses at the Dante on female figures, Le donne del Purgatorio (2016), Le donne dell'Inferno (2017), Le donne del Paradiso (2018), as well as the recent L'amore nella Vita Nuova (2020), the latter with a complete reading of the text, in Italian with a facing translation. The lessons deal with engaging subjects capable of prompting discussion on the way of understanding the feeling of love in Dante and the comparison with the contemporary world and the questions of gender that are revolutionising our perspectives on emotions and sexuality. In this regard, Sgro-Traikovski has also devised a course reader gathering writings by women Dante scholars such as Diana Glenn, Dorothy L. Sayers and Teodolinda Barolini. The makeup of the participants, numbering about fifteen to twenty people, is quite varied and includes native Italian speakers and others, with varying age ranges, from the university student to people of more advanced age. The languages of instruction are Italian and English, according to the learners' needs. The lesson is quite interactive and consists of work interpreting passages of the text in groups and sharing with the rest of the class; questions of comprehension of the Italian text occupy only a brief part of the lesson, since it is not a strictly philological or textual approach. The teacher briefly describes here the aspects that most strike his students:

In my view, the mythical-mystical-fantastical aspect of the journey through the afterlife is the thing about the Comedy that strikes them most. The modernity of Dante's thought and the possibility of identifying with him also strike them (e.g. the polemics against the Church, the at times obscene humour). Of the Vita Nuova, what certainly struck them was the adolescent embarrassment of the young Dante in Beatrice's presence.[31]

Imperfect translations

As Modesto reminds us, Dante had a translator of his own in Australia from the very dawn of the federation: Sir Samuel Griffith, premier of Queensland and for years a justice of the Australian High Court. Between 1908 and 1911[32]he translated, in his spare moments, the three canticles, later published at the translator's expense, and with mediocre sales success, by Oxford University Press with the subtitle "literally translated into English". As Griffith himself explained, to forestall criticism, his translation renders the Italian text to the letter, in the Victorian taste, so as to give "a truthful photograph of the original",[33] while sacrificing rhyme and falling back on iambic pentameter, or English blank verse. A judge who translates Dante is nothing new: as many as eleven of the thirty-three British translators of the Supreme Poet in the nineteenth century were already magistrates.[34]In the wake of many upper-middle-class intellectuals who moved from England to Australia for political or administrative roles, Griffith too set himself up as a promoter of European 'high' culture, taking up a work of universal scope, consolidated in the nineteenth century after centuries of heated anti-Dantean disputes. In this sense, it is worth noting how the Italian exiles in Europe before unification had moved away from a home-grown lectura Dantis often marked by mere philological disquisitions and devoted themselves increasingly to themes and content, to the "lesson of things valid and important for men seriously thoughtful of themselves", as Dionisotti puts it.[35]To a much smaller but still perceptible degree, the Italians exiled in Australia for political reasons between 1830 and 1848[36]showed a similar sensitivity towards the 'cult of Dante', engaging with English-speaking scholars, and nurturing a vision of literature as functional to the Italian unitary project.
In a contribution replying to an article on the city of Cordova and Arab influence in Spain,[37]which touches on the description of the Southern Cross in Purgatorio 1, a particularly perceptive reader, one George Collingridge,[38] voices doubts about the translation by the above-mentioned Badham for having rendered, for the sake of rhyme, "non visto mai fuor ch'alla prima gente" (Purgatorio, I, 24) as "known to our race before the great exile"[39] alluding to the "prima gente" as Adam and Eve, driven out of the Earthly Paradise. Collingridge's ground for censuring the translation lies in the fact that, the Supreme Poet's knowledge of Averroes being established, the latter not only learned from Arab culture of the existence of the Southern Cross, but means to indicate this "prima gente" as the first seed of humankind on the eve of the universal flood. One seems to read between the lines a claim by the peoples of the southern hemisphere to be recognised as the cradle of civilisation; Collingridge was himself a maverick intellectual, in this a follower of Dante: in a work of his from some years earlier, indeed, Collingridge had advanced the theory that Australia had been discovered by the Portuguese in the sixteenth century. From these dispassionate considerations, with no pretence of philological wit, one seems to grasp the freedom of judgement, at times rather heterodox but nonetheless lively, of the Australian public towards the 'sacred monster' Dante, a freedom that seems to be lacking, out of historical deference, among Italian non-specialists.
On the same level of boldness moves the recent translation of the Comedy by the hand of an Australian writer and poet, Clive James, who has offered a decidedly more poetic and less academic approach to the text. James tries to follow the rhythmic structure, if not the terza rima, very difficult to maintain in English, accentuating the assonances within the line, rendered in any case in blank-verse quatrains with a resolving couplet at the end of each canto. At the same time, however, especially in the Inferno (Hell in his English version), Dante's compact style is loosened and very often diluted, and numerous glosses become part of the text, so as to avoid the introduction of footnotes. The style adopted is rather engaging, full of pauses and enjambment, and concedes little or nothing to archaisms, without, however, lapsing into anachronisms, as the opening of the Inferno shows:

The visual and phonological immediacy of Dante's "rime aspre e chiocce" is often rendered by James through the use of phrasal verbs and everyday slang ("blotted out"; "harsh", "so bad"), expressions that are not necessarily attributable to modern English, but rather to a diachronic lower-middle sociolect, and that certainly do not belong to the lofty vocabulary typical of a Dante translator. James, as Joseph Luzzi points out,[41] appears far more convincing when he tackles the more rarefied atmospheres of the Purgatorio and the Paradiso, which the translator, concentrating on poetic language rather than on doctrinal and theological questions, manages to make more accessible to the English reader. For example, Purgatorio I, 19-24:[42]

In the introduction to the text, James points out that he respected the Dantean principle of making Christ rhyme only with itself, and laments that he was not able to end the three canticles with the word stars, owing to the difficulty of devising a suitable rhyme, but notes that he nonetheless placed the word within the final line. The dedication of James's translation to his wife, Prue Shaw, a Dante scholar of international renown, mentioned above, appears not only as the poet's last bequest, but revives on new foundations the fellowship between the erudite Dante and the poet Dante.
To conclude, the critical and pedagogical contribution offered by the devotees of Dante in Australia, at the level of association, language school or university course, though slight compared with other contexts, nonetheless remains a significant testimony to the tenacity with which the local community and the admirers of the Italian language and culture spread and foster appreciation of one of its undisputed protagonists.

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Wilma Radford, "Badham, Charles (1813-1884)", Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, Canberra 1969. Link:http://adb.anu.edu.au/ biography/badham-charles-2915/text4203.

Francesco Ricatti, Italians in Australia: History, Memory, Identity, Springer, New York 2018.

John Alfred Scott, "Dante ha rivisto il testo dell'Inferno nel 1314?" in J. Scott and G. Rizzoni, ed. in Studi Danteschi: Pubblicati Dalla Società Dantesca Italiana, 76 (2011), pp. 115-128.

John Alfred Scott, Perché Dante?, Aracne Editrice, Roma 2010.

John Alfred Scott, "Una contraddizione scientifica nell'opera dantesca", in Boyd, P. Russo, & V. (eds), Dante e la Scienza (Vol. 1), Longo, Ravenna 1995, pp. 149-55.

Eileen Elizabeth Anne Slarke and Centro dantesco dei Frati minori conventuali di Ravenna, Dante in Australia : trenta artisti Australiani contemporanei interpretano Dante Alighieri, sotto l'alto patronato del Presidente della Republica. Ravenna 1 April - 30 September 1993, Chiostri Francescani g.c. dalla Cassa di Risparmio di Ravenna, Centro Dantesco dei Frati Minori Conventuali, Ravenna 1993.

Notes

[1] In 1976 the number of Italians amounted to 270,000, net of the return home of 90,000 migrants between 1947 and 1976. See: Stephen Castles, "Italians in Australia: The Impact of a Recent Migration on the Culture and Society of a Postcolonial Nation", in The Columbus People: Perspectives in Italian Immigration to the Americas and Australia , ed. by Lydio F. Tomasi, Piero Gastaldo, and Thomas Row, Center for Migration Studies, New York 1994, p. 346, cited in Francesco Ricatti, Italians in Australia: History, Memory, Identity, Springer, New York 2018, p. 27. According to the 2016 census, Melbourne has 63,332 residents born in Italy, the city with the highest Italian component; 70% are over 65 years of age. https://www.theage.com.au/national /victoria/census-2016-results-melbourne-losing-its-italian-flavour-as-migrants-age-20170628-gx0eeb.html.

[2] Images taken from https://studentvip.com.au/la-trobe/melbourne/maps/121551. The monument is listed on the state register of cultural and artistic heritage. Link: https://vhd.heritagecouncil.vic.gov.au/places/ 66789.

[3]E. E. A. Slarke and Centro dantesco dei Frati minori conventuali di Ravenna, Dante in Australia : trenta artisti Australiani contemporanei interpretano Dante Alighieri, sotto l'alto patronato del Presidente della Republica. Ravenna 1 April - 30 September 1993 Chiostri Francescani g.c. dalla Cassa di Risparmio di Ravenna, Centro Dantesco dei Frati Minori Conventuali, Ravenna 1993.

[4]https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/collection/international/print/b/blake/dante.html

[5] Michael Curtotti, "Dante Alighieri in the Wide Brown Land", expanded version of a talk recorded at the Società Dante Alighieri of Canberra on 22 March 2020 (the first national Dantedì), published on 25 March 2020, pp. 11-12. Link: http://danteact.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Dante-and-His-Influence-in-Australia-final.pdf

[6] Australian Bureau of Statistics, "2016 Census Quick Stats". Link: https://quickstats.censusdata.abs.gov.au/ census_services/getproduct/census/2016/quickstat/036.

[7] Margherita Angelucci and Laura Egan, "Let's make Italian the language of the future", in Il Globo, 12 February 2019. See also the dossier for the Stati Generali della Lingua italiana nel mondo, L'italiano nel mondo che cambia - 2019, published by the Ministero degli Affari Esteri e della Cooperazione Internazionale, Palazzo Firenze, 9 October 2019, p. 8. (https://www.linguaitaliana.esteri.it/novita/documenti/content/70/allegato.do).

[8] Roslyn Pesman Cooper, "Sir Samuel Griffith, Dante and the Italian Presence in Nineteenth-Century Australian Literary Culture", in Australian Literary Studies, vol. 14, no. 2, 1989, p. 206 (https://doi.org/10.20314 /als. 401a36f6fa).

[9] Rather than italian literature, one speaks of italianate, to mean an Italian taste or style filtered through English eyes. R. Pesman Cooper, art. cit., pp. 202-203.

[10] Alan Mayne, Reluctant Italians? One Hundred Years of the Dante Alighieri Society in Melbourne. 1896-1996 (Melbourne: Dante Alighieri Society, 1997) pp. 20 and 24.

[11] Wilma Radford, "Badham, Charles (1813-1884)", in Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, Canberra 1969. Link: http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/badham-charles-2915/text4203.

[12]"Dr. Badham's Lecture on Dante", in Sydney Morning Herald, 27 November 1882, p. 10 (https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/13524497) and "Dr. Badham on Dante", in The Sydney Morning Herald, 9 December 1882, p. 12 (https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/13523459).

[13]"Lecture on Dante", in The Sydney Morning Herald, 5 November 1892, p. 7 (https://trove.nla.gov.au /newspaper/ article/13885125).

[14] Joseph Lo Bianco, "Brief Outline of the Australian Language Policy Experience", Interagency Language Roundtable, p.5. Link: https://www.govtilr.org/Publications/ILR_papers01.htm.

[15] Margaret Baker and Diana Glenn (eds), Dante's Colloquia in Australia, Australian Humanities Press, Adelaide 2000.

[16] See, for example, Giorgio Inglese, "Per lo 'stemma' della 'Commedia' dantesca. Tentativo di statistica degli errori significativi", in Filologia italiana, 4, 2007, pp. 51-72. Link: https://www.academia.edu/7413206/stemma _commedia

[17] On this, see the discussion by Andrea Canova, "Il testo della Commedia dopo l'edizione Petrocchi", in Il centro e il cerchio. Convegno dantesco, Brescia, Università Cattolica, 30-31 October 2009, ed. by Cristina Cappelletti, Fabrizio Serra editore, Pisa, Roma 2011, p. 69.

[18] Shaw clarifies, through digital comparison, that the Rb artefact (Biblioteca Riccardiana di Firenze) proceeds from the Urbinate and is therefore not an α manuscript, as maintained by Sanguineti.

[19] Link to the online version: http://sd-editions.com/AnaServer?commediaonline+0+start.anv+stype=intro

[20] Diana Modesto, "Dante all'altro polo: Dante Studies in Australasia", in Dante Studies, with the Annual Report of the Dante Society, No. 119, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore 2001, p. 205.

[21] See the reforms implemented from the 1980s onwards. In 1985 the Liberal government established the creation of a Waste Watch Committee, which struck at research or academic initiatives deemed devoid of public utility (see: https://biography.senate.gov.au/baume-michael-ehrenfried/). In more recent years (2005, 2017 and 2018), the Liberal leadership influenced the refusal of at least eleven research projects promoted by the Australian Research Council because they were considered superfluous and useless for Australian taxpayers. Most recent is the government's refusal to launch a policy of economic aid to universities afflicted by the effects of the pandemic, favouring other areas, even though the revenues of the university sector figure among the most important items in the Australian economy's balance sheet.

[22] Gavin Moodie, "Why is the Australian Government Making the Universities Suffer?", in The Conversation, 19 May 2020. Link: https://theconversation.com/why-is-the-australian-government-letting-universities-suffer-138514.

[23] John Kinder, "Dante turns 750: His Medieval Masterpiece and our Modern Search for Meaning", in Australian eJournal of Theology 23.1 (April 2016), p. 5.

[24]John Scott, Perché Dante?, Aracne Editrice, Roma 2010.

[25] Scott is a promoter of that branch of humanities studies known as the history of emotions, quite frequented in the Anglo-American academic sphere.

[26] John A. Scott, "Dante ha rivisto il testo dell'Inferno nel 1314?" in J. Scott and G. Rizzoni, ed. in Studi Danteschi: Pubblicati Dalla Società Dantesca Italiana, 76(2011), pp. 115-128.

[27]John A. Scott, "Una contraddizione scientifica nell'opera dantesca", in Boyd, P. Russo, & V. (eds), Dante e la Scienza (Vol. 1), Longo, Ravenna 1995, pp. 149-55.

[28] See, as a fairly representative example, "L'assemblea generale della Dante", in Il giornale italiano, Sydney, 10 April 1935, p. 2 (https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/83039741).

[29] Gianfranco Cresciani, Fascism, Anti-Fascism and Italians in Australia 1922-1945, Australian National University Press, Canberra, London and Trumbull 1980 pp. 37-39 (https://openresearch-repository.anu.edu.au/bitstream/ 1885/114715/2/b1209190x.pdf). 1925 was not the year of the Dante's birth in Sydney, but it was certainly a turning point in the management of its cultural activities.

[30] See Catherine Dewhirst, "The 'Southern Question' in Australia: The 1925 Royal Commission's Racialisation of Southern Italians" in Queensland History Journal, Volume 22, No. 4, February 2014, p. 317. Link: https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/19580163.pdf.

[31]From a correspondence with Nicholas Sgrò-Traikovski, 12 June 2020.

[32]R. Pesman Cooper, "Sir Samuel Griffith, Dante and the Italian Presence in Nineteenth-Century Australian Literary Culture" cit. p. 199. In 1914 Griffith would also complete a translation of the Vita Nuova.

[33] R. B. Joyce, "Griffith, Sir Samuel Walker (1845-1920)", in Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, (http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/griffith-sir-samuel-walker-445/ text11119 ), first edition 1983.

[34] R. Pesman Cooper, op. cit., p. 211.

[35] C. Dionisotti, "Varia fortuna di Dante", in Geografia e storia della letteratura italiana, Torino: Einaudi, 1999, p. 278. Dionisotti observes how the fortune of Dante was at first the response of Italian anti-Romanticism to literary models of northern European provenance.

[36] P. Corti and M. Sanfilippo, L'Italia e le migrazioniLaterza, Roma, Bari 2012. The 1881 census identified only 521 Italians in Australia, made up mainly of missionaries and political exiles.

[37] A. B. Piddington, "Cordova", in The Sydney Morning Herald, 5 July 1913, p. 5. Link: https://trove.nla.gov.au/ newspaper/article/15433223?searchTerm=dante%20and%20cordova&searchLimits=.

[38] G. Collingridge, "Dante and the Southern Cross", in The Sydney Morning Herald, 23 July 1913, p. 16 (https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/15437749).

[39] Quoted as the epigraph to a chapter by Collingridge himself in Collingridge, The discovery of Australia: A critical, documentary and historic investigation concerning the priority of discovery in Australasia by Europeans before the arrival of Lieut. James Cook, in the «Endeavour,» in the year 1770. Sydney: Hayes brothers, 1895, p. 9.

[40] Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, trans. by Clive James, Picador, London 2013, p. 3. The Italian version is taken from the Petrocchi edition. Link: https://digitaldante.columbia.edu/dante/divine-comedy.

[41] Joseph Luzzi, "This Could Be 'Heaven,' or This Could Be 'Hell'", in New York Times Book Review, Apr 21, 2013, p. 13.

[42] Dante Alighieri, op. cit., p. 175. The translation, as often happens with James, tends to expand the original text by making explicit; in this case, the myth of the Pierides, daughters of Pierus, transformed into magpies by Calliope: the passage in fact translates lines 13-18 of Dante's text.

Luigi Gussago teaches Italian literature at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.